April 2012 Volume 15 Number 2 - Educational Technology & Society

Methods
Figure 5. Quest NPCs providing information about quests
This study focuses on the research question: how are the influences of game quests on students’ subject learning in
terms of perception of enjoyment and goal-pursuing. To answer the question, a within-subjects experiment was
conducted in an elementary school in Taiwan.
Participants
The participants in this experiment were 53 elementary students from two fourth-grade classes (median age: ten
years old). In Class A there were 28 students, including 15 males and 13 females, while in Class B there were 25
students, including 14 boys and 11 girls. Since the elementary school has a policy of normal distribution at the start
of the first, third, and fifth school year. Accordingly, it was assumed that the participations in each of the two groups
have similar learning backgrounds and learning abilities, and that order effects have been controlled.
Instruments
Two system versions
Two different versions of the My-Pet-My-Quest system were prepared for the experiment: one with quests (i.e., viaversion)
and the other without quests (i.e., without-version). The two versions contain the same learning materials:
two units of math activities in the mini-games about mastering the addition of two three-digit numbers. However,
they are delivered to students by different ways.
With regard to the via-version, learning materials were delivered to students via game quests, which consisted of
informer NPC, quest NPC, locales, learning tasks, narrative, and rewards. More specifically, learning materials in the
via-version were integrated with the narratives of the quests delivered by an informer-NPC and quest-NPCs. In
addition, the narratives were developed as the theme of mathematician’s problems. Some famous mathematicians,
such as Newton, Euler, Gauss, and Archimedes, are calling for help about math problems. Consequently, students in the
via-version would meet the informer-NPC with the message that some famous mathematicians’ math problems. Then
students could explore different locales to obtain further information from certain quest-NPCs according to the cues
provided by the informer-NPC. When they successfully completed learning materials, they would be rewarded by coins
for their pets.
With regard to the without-version, the same learning materials were delivered by clicking a system menu, without
informer-NPC, quest-NPC, and narrative, and locales. When they successfully completed learning materials, they were
also rewarded by coins for their pets.
322